Precious Water

...Water, Thales believed, was the foundation of all matter and therefore the principle of all life...

...Powledge's book, however, is more than a compendium of cover-ups, industrial accidents, and willful abuses of the planet...

...Along with such blatant cases of taxpayers underwriting their own inevitable social disasters, Powledge addresses our unwillingness to learn more about water...

...Like most vital resources, water becomes a topic for conversation only when it is missing or in short supply...

...Love Canal was a relatively shallow trench," Powledge writes...

...The scope here is larger: It suggests that accidents and insults to the biosphere do not occur in a vacuum...

...Better" technology in the form of deep-well turbine pumps has allowed Arizona to "mine" more water from the ground...

...cancer is a relatively slow-acting disease, and so the true price of our poisonous profligacy may not be paid by our bodies, and our children's bodies, until decades after that...

...In some ways, Water is a retracing and updating of the catastrophe Rachel Carson warned of in Silent Spring...

...It does not take an organic chemist, or even an economist, to understand that the solution here is to stop subsidizing irrigation to bring more and more arid land under cultivation—in many cases to produce crops already subsidized by government price supports...

...Gilpin's 1860 theory suggested that the agricultural conversion of the arid West was simply a matter of tapping available aquifers...

...Arizona's better technology has only increased the state's demand for water...

...Then he gets down to cases: Love Canal, Tellico Dam and the snail darter, pork barrels and poisons...

...We know little about "repairing" an aquifer once it is fouled...

...It is reasonable to argue that for all the scientific flaws of Gilpin's theory, it is his model that developers have made their working reality— through water diversion projects, through overdrafting or aquifers, through agricultural methods that waste the land and poison the waters...

...short-term availability should not be confused with actual supply...

...Forsaking all metaphor, the title delimits exactly what the book addresses: Water: The Nature, Uses, and Future of Our Most Precious and Abused Resource...

...A man born 640 years before Jesus Christ left us with a much wiser metaphor for understanding water...

...So far, it has been Gilpin's vision, rather than Thales's, that has dominated American attitudes toward water...

...Technology does this by providing increased efficiency in the conversion of resources to human needs...

...Even then the full impact may not be known...

...In clear prose, Powledge, who teaches at New York's New School for Social Research, lays out his case that water will become the topic of choice for many Americans in the 1980s: "Just as we awoke one morning a few years ago to the realization that fuel for our cars, factories, and homes was no longer cheap, and never again would be, that we would never again be able to conduct our lives oblivious to thoughts of energy .. .now we are about to awake to the understanding that water, in the forms we require and of the quality and quantities we desire, is no longer, and almost certainly never again will be, a free good, to be taken and used with hardly a second thought...

...I thought of Thales and Gilpin while reading a passage in which Powledge quotes an electric industry official who criticized "paranoid anxieties created by the doomsday syndrome...

...The Ionian metaphysician Thales saw the world as a disc that floats upon a primeval body of water...

...Powledge begins with a crash course on the chemistry, economics, and politics of water...

...Those drills, however, have not increased the already dwindling groundwater reserves of that state...

...There is much to arrest the reader in Powledge's discussion of how industrial civilization has abused water (even though the absence of footnotes and a bibliography blunts some of the book's force and value as a research tool...

...Water from those aquifers would, in turn, improve the local climate and unlock the natural fertility of the region...

...William Gilpin is not mentioned in Water...

...Hooker Chemical started dumping its toxic wastes into Love Canal during the 1950s, but the wastes came to the surface only in the late 1970s...

...Sounding a little like a latter day Gilpin, the official said, "History testifies that advances in technology expand the availability of resources...

...that waste and environmental insensitivity are not only acceptable in industrial civilization, but also immensely profitable, and not just in the developed social democracies...

...Tom Chaff)n (Tom Chaffin is a free-lance writer in San Francisco...

...Experts can't agree on how much we have or even how to measure it...

...Powledge quotes a representative from a Third World nation as he makes his case for boosterism at any price: "We want to invite industry to come in and, as an incentive, we want to be able to tell them that they don't have to worry too much about environmental concerns...

...The toxic substances that have been discarded more recently may not reach our water supplies for dozens of years...

...Fred Powledge has written a thoughtful and street-wise book that just might be the catalyst we need to begin talking about a national water policy...

...We have Powledge to thank for showing us the dimensions of our planned obsolescence, and the way out...

...Groundwater moves slowly, Powledge reminds us...

...In essence, wrote Gilpin, "rain follows the plow...

...Arizona, with its vast irrigation system and cheap water, is consuming water at almost twice the natural replenishment rate, Powledge notes...